233 Online Homebuyer Mystery Shopping Results - Leah Fellows and Carol Morgan Sep 4 2024

Greg Bray: [00:00:00] Hello, everybody, and welcome to today's episode of The Home Builder Digital Marketing Podcast. I'm Greg Bray with Blue Tangerine.

Kevin Weitzel: And I'm Kevin Weitzel with OutHouse.

Greg Bray: And we are excited today to have two guests joining us. We have Leah Fellows, who's the president of Blue Gypsy Inc. and Carol Morgan, who is the president of Denim Marketing. Welcome, Leah and Carol. Thanks for being with us.

Leah Fellows: Thanks for having us.

Carol Morgan: Great to be here.

Greg Bray: Well, I think you guys are pretty well known, but let's go ahead and give folks that 3o second introduction. We'll start with you, Carol. Just tell us a little bit about yourself and what you've been [00:01:00] doing.

Carol Morgan: Yeah. Well, Carol Morgan, I'm in the Atlanta, Georgia area. We work with builders and developers nationwide. And golly, what I've been doing, lots of month-end reports is what I've been doing this week and last week, wrapping up July and diving into August and lots of pitching of public relations. So, keeps us busy over here at Denim, writing PR and blogging, and social media.

Greg Bray: And Leah, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Leah Fellows: Cool. I can do that. Well, I am a national online sales counselor trainer and what that means is I help builders hire, train, create, grow, whatever it is they need, that online sales counselor program, which is that intersection of marketing and sales. I do a lot of different things, but it's all related to that teeny tiny niche that's kind of the very beginning of the customer journey and there to help meet and greet all your buyers when they get to your website and start asking questions.

Kevin Weitzel: Now we get to the part where I get to enjoy making people uncomfortable, talking about themselves, something [00:02:00] other than work or anything related to the home building industry.

Carol, we'll start with you. Tell us a personal factoid about Carol that we haven't heard before, hopefully.

Carol Morgan: Well, hopefully, you guys don't know this, but I have a bird. It's a little European starling that my son rescued from a nest. He fell out of his nest. He was probably a few days old. Bird is seven, I think now, or maybe he's eight. His name is Chirp, and European starlings are in the myna bird family so they can talk. He's a wild bird, but unfortunately, we hand-fed him, so he imprinted on humans. European starlings aren't protected. They're considered a noxious species. Nobody will rehab them, so we rehabbed them.

But after he got big enough and learned to fly, my son Forrest released him three days in a row, let him sit outside on the fig tree. Where he sat and ate insects all day because they're insectivores. And then a few hours later Forrest would go outside and check on him and every single day he hopped on Forest's shoulder to come back in the [00:03:00] house.

So, I have a bird that one of my employees, most of you all know Courtney, she's our VP. She went upstairs to get in my refrigerator one day a few weeks ago and came back down and she said, well, I don't know what the heck you eat, but that bird is stocked. So, once a week I meal prep for the bird. And apparently, the bird eats better than I do. So, there you go. That's a fun fact.

Kevin Weitzel: That's cool. And I didn't know that.

Greg Bray: Is the birdhouse trained?

Carol Morgan: The bird has a giant atrium in the house. He's really not house-trained, but he's not big enough to make much of a mess. I just have to be careful with him because there are a lot of kitty cat inhabitants here, which most people do know about me.

Kevin Weitzel: Yes. All right, Leah, what do we got?

Leah Fellows: Well, I think a lot of people who know me know that before the building industry, I was a dive instructor and a sailboat captain. So, I spent 13 years traveling around the world, worked on sailboats for half of that and different dive boats. But what some people may not know is that my very first dive job after I got my dive instructor [00:04:00] certification was actually on a live aboard dive boat in the Cayman Islands. And I was not really supposed to be teaching diving. I was the galley assistant.

So, that meant I was washing dishes. I was scrubbing toilets. I was making beds. I got to go diving whenever I could. And for 2 weeks out of every 8, I actually had to cook all the meals for 18 passengers and 6 crew members. I don't have any sort of culinary licensing or anything. I just said I can do this. And that's a little bit about how I did about just about anything in my life is, Hey, I think I can do this. And here we are.

Kevin Weitzel: Total immersion. Just get it done. Did you go with the, how would you like your breakfast prepared? Or how would to put your spam and eggs on a plate?

Leah Fellows: No, actually we had a set menu and the crazy thing was that the chef that was the regular chef, he would go and do all the grocery shopping before he left on his two-week time off, and then I would have to cook [00:05:00] the meals that he had actually scheduled. And the guy actually did not like me very much and he tried sabotaging me the first time and he didn't buy all the food that was needed for one of the meals.

And when you're out at sea, it's not like you can go grocery shopping. So, I was able to then kind of improvise and take a look at what we had and create something completely different. And there were people on the boat that had been there before when he had been on board and said, my cooking was better than his. So, that really didn't actually set up a great interaction with me for the next year with this guy because he really wasn't a big fan.

Kevin Weitzel: Sounds like a great Below Deck episode.

Leah Fellows: I've never watched that show, but people often say to me that I should.

Greg Bray: Well, Leah and Carol, we appreciate you being with us. The reason we wanted to have you guys on is you've been doing this mystery shopping report for the last several years, and recently came out with your 4th one, I believe, [00:06:00] right? So, we wanted to understand a little more about some of the insights and findings and things that came out of this activity and report and research that you've been doing. Before we dive into some of the numbers just tell us a little bit about the background of how you decided to start doing this and what you were hoping to learn from it initially and why you've continued to do it.

Carol Morgan: Yeah, I think much like Leah and her diving trips, we wanted to take a deep dive into what builders were doing. And then like her cooking experience, we wanted to inspire them to do better and to be creative, and to find solutions to their problems. Leah might have a more in-depth answer than that, but that's my answer today.

Leah Fellows: Well, it's kind of funny if you go back to when we started, I think the first one of these that we did was in 2020. Back then Carol, Kimberly Mackey, and I were doing sort of these don't panic webinars right when started. I don't know if anybody remembers those. There were about 8 weeks worth of those where we were trying to make sure people [00:07:00] weren't like panicking and having crazy attacks over what was going on. And we realized we didn't have a lot of data. Right? Carol, remember that?

Carol Morgan: I remember that those were so much fun.

Leah Fellows: So, we decided we really needed to start looking at how builders were responding to inquiries and leads and what their processes were. And of course, I do mystery shops anyway within my company. And we partnered up with Melinda Brody and Company because, for anybody who does or doesn't know who they are, they are great people great at mystery shops on site. And we worked together with them to do online mystery shops the way I would do them if I was checking on an OSC.

And so, we started looking at how many builders actually were responding to their incoming leads on the website. So, we'd fill out a website form and we would see what kind of response we were getting, and we would check it over a 30-day period to see what they were doing to try to get the buyers to respond. And [00:08:00] so, that's kind of how it all came about.

The last one we just released was our 2023 data. I know it just came out now in 2024. We're working on our 2024 one soon and it'll be released hopefully the end of this year. But 2023 was released a little bit late this year because of different factors, but still very relevant.

Greg Bray: As you were trying to decide how to shop these folks, first of all, the builders don't know, right? I just want to be clear. Mystery means that they don't know you're doing this to them. Correct?

Carol Morgan: Correct. They do not know.

Greg Bray: Okay. How do you go about deciding what builders that you want to reach out to and

shop?

Carol Morgan: That's kind of an interesting collaborative effort. We have some builders that we're tracking over time that have been on the study since day one. But then the team from Denim, the team from Blue Gypsy, and the team from Melinda Brody kind of sit down and look at who are the top builders. You know, do we want to add any of them? Are we working with somebody that we really want to know more about? So, we kind of randomly add a few builders [00:09:00] each year to the list.

Leah Fellows: It is pretty random. We do start out with the top 200, you know, we look at the top 200 list. Last year in 2022 versus, you know, before that, so 2022 and 2023, we actually started creating some subsets. So, even though we shop 50 builders a year, we started looking at, okay, if we have these 10 that are sort of your top nationals, smaller regionals, all the way down to the little mom-and-pop shops, we try to get data in each of those categories.

If you download our report, we do break some of that data out in those categories and we've done that for the last two years. I think we'll continue to do it. You know, Ben, who's not on here, we let him play with the numbers of a lot. He's the best person for that. But yeah, no, the builders do not know we're shopping them. They don't know who they are. We shop them for 30 days. We submit a form fill on their website with a phone number and email address and a question, so we're looking for them to [00:10:00] personalize their response to us.

The things we look for is speed to lead. So, we look to see how fast are they responding to us. We look at diversity of the touch points over the 30 days, how many different ways do they try to contact us, and frequency of the messaging. Carol and I love this one because we find that some builders have OSCs and some builders don't.

And so, there's a couple of really markety market stuff that we look at. Markety market. Is that a term? Like, do they actually have autoresponders, which you would think that's a no-brainer, right? But they don't. And do they have a marketing drip campaign that they do side by side with an OSC follow-up, a personalized follow-up? Right? So, those are things we uncover throughout this whole shop.

Kevin Weitzel: So, being that you have some of those subsets, and I don't mean to swing at a bat out of left field here, because I'm in the mindset that these big giant corporations have these massive teams that can make phone calls, that have [00:11:00] OSCs at their ready, that have email drip campaigns ready to rock and roll. Do you find that they are more effective in the results over the mom-and-pop shops or was there not any data that supports that?

Leah Fellows: I'm looking the one that's in front of me is the 2022. let me see if I can find that 2023 real quick.

Carol Morgan: I don't think that they were that much more effective. Now, they're more effective if they have an OSC and they have an OSC program. But it's interesting to see some of these smaller local builders that have OSCs perform really quite well.

Leah Fellows: Yeah. I will tell you that the two subsets that responded via email within 5 minutes or less in 2023 were the large production builders. Ten percent of them did. Only 10%. And the medium regional builders, only 10 percent of them did. Nobody else responded in 5 minutes or less. Speed to lead, not so much. And that's not breaking out whether they had an OSC program or not. That's just looking at the subsets. There's a lot of [00:12:00] numbers in front of me. Somebody else is going to have to look at that if they really want to see.

Greg Bray: Well, and just for our audience, you know, sometimes it's hard to process numbers when we're just talking without visuals to go with it. So, we will have links to where you could get the study and we'll talk more about that near the end. So, if you're like having trouble following some of these numbers as we go through them, don't worry. You can get this data and take a look at it later. So, don't stress. So many questions. You've already hit on a couple of things and we're only going to have like four hours in this episode to get through it all. Just kidding.

Carol Morgan: Should be enough time.

Greg Bray: So, first of all, you talked about that there's a difference between the people who have an OSC program and the ones who don't. How, from a mystery shop standpoint, did you decide whether or not a builder has an OSC program? Did you actually ask them that question or are you making some assumptions? Are you looking for indicators on the website? How did you categorize them?

Carol Morgan: That's a good question. So, sometimes we know that they have an OSC, so that makes it easy. Other times we're looking at their website to see if they have an OSC, because [00:13:00] usually they'll say, you can read between the lines and know whether it's a real person or not in an OSC. And then, sometimes we're surprised because you find out in the follow-up that someone that you didn't think had an OSC does.

Leah Fellows: Yeah, I would say that's definitely it. We look, for the most part, do they have a website presence. And that's one thing. Is there OSC present on the website? We look for that. Or does it show up in the emails that we know? And so, those are the two methods by which we decide, okay, there are OSCs.

Greg Bray: So, you did discriminate against builders who do not have websites?

Carol Morgan: Yes, we did discriminate. If you do not have a website, you are not in this report at all.

Kevin Weitzel: Actually, the legitimate part of that question, I know that that was a little tongue in cheek from Greg, but if they were a builder but didn't have any kind of formal contact this form, because I see that from time to time as well, where they just have their phone number and, you know, an address because you said you were filling out a contact form, correct?

Leah Fellows: Yeah.

Kevin Weitzel: So, how often did you run into builders that didn't have that, or did all the ones that you contacted did? [00:14:00]

Leah Fellows: I'm pretty sure. I mean, that would be more of a Ben question. His team is the one that does the actual shopping, but I don't think I've ever heard him say, Hey, we can't find a form somewhere.

Carol Morgan: Right.

Leah Fellows: It may be buried, but they find it. It may be, you know, eight clicks to the center of the Tootsie pop.

Kevin Weitzel: It's not as good as three licks to the center.

Leah Fellows: You're right.

Greg Bray: You talked about speed to lead and you are measuring that baseline of less than 5 minutes. Is that what you said to get back to somebody? What was kind of the average response time? And what was the shocking like, Oh, my goodness, I can't believe it was this slow response times that you may have seen?

Carol Morgan: I'm actually looking at that. Well, this is a personalized email response times. Again, we have it broken out by different types of responses. But I would say, you know, within 30 minutes, there's a pretty good group of builders that did pretty well and again within four hours.

But what's shocking is if you [00:15:00] look at the list of people who never responded with a personalized email. That's pretty shocking. I mean, the number is shocking. For small regional builders, it was 50 percent who never responded. And for a large national production builders, it's 30 percent who never responded. It's just shocking.

Leah Fellows: Yeah, but if you look at overall, we sort of have our own scale of, you know, preferred to abhorring, horrible. Obviously, 5 minutes is preferred. Overall, if we look at the entire group of 50, only 4 percent responded in 5 minutes or less. That's down 50 percent from 2022. In 2022, 8 percent responded in 5 minutes or less.

Greg Bray: So, we're getting worse in our quick response time.

Carol Morgan: Right. We're getting worse.

Leah Fellows: 34 percent did not respond at all, which I think is up 4 percent from last year because I think it was 3 percent last year,

Carol Morgan: The getting worse thing is interesting, Greg. So, you look at when we started this, we [00:16:00] started it during COVID, right? And it was like, lead, lead, lead, you know, cause COVID became the free-for-all all, everybody wanted to buy a house. And then, 2020, 2021 were pretty good years, 22, 23, you know, we're in 2024 now. It's going to be interesting to see what this year shows. I mean, it's still kind of a seller's market because we don't have any resale to compete with. So, part of me wonders is part of this lack of response is they feel like they're going to sell it whether they respond or not. I don't know. It's shocking to me.

Kevin Weitzel: I think that does play a factor in the fact that there are sales teams that become lazy for a couple of reasons. One is if they've got an endless line of people coming in, there's no reason to have to up your game. But the other factor is how often is it that they're depending on autoresponders to do their job thinking he's doing it well enough to where they don't have to go out and do a personal call or an email or follow up?

Leah Fellows: Well, only 50 percent of builders have an auto responder in this. So, only a 50\50 [00:17:00] chance your auto responders going to catch it. You know, those stats that I just quoted were based on emails going out in five minutes or less. Well, of course, you should pick up the phone first, right?

Carol Morgan: What? We should call somebody in 2024. Does your phone even work anymore?

Leah Fellows: Yeah, but 60 percent didn't call anyone and only 2 percent made a phone call in 5 minutes or less. So, we're really just spending a lot of marketing dollars generating leads, and we've got to be better about how we're actually tending to those leads.

Kevin Weitzel: Well, let me ask you this, do we have a generational problem? Because a lot of OSCs are younger in nature. I love my kids to death, but they would rather Text somebody and use their thumbs and actually, God forbid, have to pick up a phone and actually use their voice to talk to somebody. Do you find that that's the case? Or are they getting over that?

Leah Fellows: No, because texting is abysmal. The number of texts that people are actually sending out to these leads is slim to none. We look at all the ways people [00:18:00] follow up. We look at emails, phone calls, text messages and video emails, and text messaging and video emails totally...

Carol Morgan: Just tanked, even compared to previous years. I actually think that people were doing better during covered with texting and video, just because they felt like they needed to do something different because they couldn't see anyone in person. And now that we're back to being in person, it kind of feels like everything else is kind of sloughed off.

Greg Bray: So, what I'm hearing you say is that builders that have an OSC are doing better than builders that don't. But just having an OSC doesn't mean you're actually doing a very good job at being quick and personal and responsive to what's going on. Is that a fair takeaway here from what I'm hearing so far?

Leah Fellows: It's fair and disheartening from my perspective because the thing that I have seen over the last 4 or 5 years is that when builders finally realized they needed OSCs, they just handed the keys over and said, you're an OSC, here's your laptop, here's your [00:19:00] phone and they didn't train them. If you're not trained in best practices, how are you going to make sure you're doing the right thing? And it's all on the OSC to decide if they're doing the right thing, because most of these programs are set up improperly, in my opinion, in my experience coming in.

I mean, just looking at your text question, 8 percent of all builders sent out text messages. That's like, one, maybe and 75 percent of those were from OSCs.

Okay, so this is what you're seeing. There's not enough training going on. There's a deficit of training because I don't know, maybe we just think that it's appointment setting, it's order taking, but it's so much more than that. We need to set expectations for these programs and what they're supposed to be. But, yes, time and again, OSCs are higher performing than builders without OSCs. It's definitely better than not having that role.

Greg Bray: Hey, everybody. This is Greg from Blue Tangerine. And I just wanted to personally invite you to join Kevin and me at the upcoming Home Builder Digital Marketing Summit. It's going to be October 23rd and 24th in Raleigh, North Carolina. You do not want to miss this. We're going to have marketing education. We're going to have online sales counselor education. We're going to have networking, round table discussions, and of course, a whole lot of fun. So, make sure you get registered today and join us. You can get all the details at buildermarketingsummit.com. Can't wait to see you there.

Now, Carol, when you're talking with builders because you come at it more from the [00:20:00] marketing side and generating these leads, right? Work really hard to get out in front of the prospects and get them to the website and to learn more about the builder. Do you ever tell builders, no, you don't actually need more leads, you need to take care of the ones you've got?

Carol Morgan: Maybe I need to start saying that to them because if this report shows us what's going on industry-wide, then for all of us on this call, 50 percent of the people we work with need to do a lot better.

But it is interesting Greg, you know, a lot of times we'll ask, you know, we ask. You know, I want to know how I'm performing. So, of the leads you're getting, you know, how many of those came in for an appointment or how many of those have you been able to close? What is the quality of the lead that we're driving to you? And it's sometimes surprising how many builders can't really answer that question. And I think it goes back to the same thing, you know, having a CRM isn't the same thing as using a CRM or having someone who wants to use the CRM. That would be helpful for all of us. Because, you know, I don't necessarily know.

I mean, I can look at Google. I can look at [00:21:00] Google pay per click. I can look at the Facebook ads. I can look at where the traffic's coming in. I can look where the contact forms are coming in and look all the completions and all the things we can set up on our end. But, you know, I've got to have a little bit of feedback from that sales team as well to really know how we're performing.

Leah Fellows: Oh, I have a great story on that real quick. I have a client who we were talking about their low lead numbers. And so, I reached out to their SEO company and I was talking to him, we were looking at Google Analytics together and he was showing me how many phone calls are coming in. And it would say, like, well, they're getting 95 phone calls according to Google Analytics. And then, I would look in their CallRail and see a much lower number. And then in CallRail, I could see, well, yes, they might be getting a certain number, but how many of those are actually for warranty? How many of those are for actual, et cetera, et cetera?

So, we have to be careful where we track the numbers and what we think, and how clean our numbers are. Because I don't want online sales counselors to say, I only got five [00:22:00] phone calls and they've got 20 and some of them were just not qualified. But I do want them to not count as a lead. Somebody calling up to order a pizza. That's not what they're there for. So, what is a lead is a big question in our industry. What is a lead and how do we tend to it, and how do we quantify it? What do we look for in tracking accountability? Right.

Greg Bray: Man. This is I guess disheartening is a little bit of the reaction I'm having. When you guys got this data, were you surprised by some of this information? Granted, you've been looking at some trends over the years.

Carol Morgan: I was surprised. I thought we'd be doing better. To me, a lot of it's just the definition of insanity. You know, we're doing the same survey and getting the same results and sharing the same results over and over again. Why aren't we as an industry doing better?

Leah Fellows: It's not even the same results. In a lot of cases, it's lower. I mean, this was the first year we had any OSC do zero response, and it was [00:23:00] four of the OSCs had zero response. They were identified. It was identified on their website that they supposedly had online sales counselors. That, or we knew personally, that they had online sales counselors, and yet 4 had 0 response. Like, to me, it makes me go, gosh, what are we doing?

And the percentage of OSCs was lower this year. So, in 2022, 80 percent of builders had OSCs and this year, only 68 percent had them. So, they've eliminated departments. Departments have been eliminated, and we've seen that because as leads became slower, we thought, oh, we can throw them out to our site agents again. Right? That didn't work.

Carol Morgan: Right. You know, and that's hard. I think it depends on the site agent. But again, if those leads are coming in and going to the site agent, are they getting touched again in the CRM? You know, are they getting really worked the way that an OSC would work them? In a lot of cases, I think not. [00:24:00] Because the on-site salesperson has a whole other set of tasks that they should be doing versus working that lead the way an OSC would work that lead.

Leah Fellows: For sure. For sure.

Kevin Weitzel: Coming from the car industry, I know that your salespeople, as polished as they are, as many rah rah sessions as they go to, as many summits as they go to, I can tell you that salespeople are notoriously lazy. They only do the bare bones minimum of what it takes to get it done. In a lot of cases. There's exceptions to the rules, of course.

However, I can also tell you that in the car side, over 80 percent of all car sales can be attributed to process through what they call BDC. It's the same thing as our OSCs, 80%. I would be curious to know of homebuilders, what they can attribute of sales going through OSCs. The follow-up to that is that if you could attribute even 50 percent of your sales through an OSC, why on earth would you ever get rid of that department? That's crazy in my book.

Leah Fellows: I 100 percent agree. And I can tell you historically, like, since I started, I started as an OSC in 2007. When I [00:25:00] was an online sales counselor, we said 20 to 25 percent of overall sales passed through could be attributed to coming through the online sales counselor program. Pre-COVID, when I started training, I saw 35 to 45 percent or more coming through the online sales program when I got to work with builders, teach them, and get them to fine-tune it.

Then when COVID hit, we were seeing 60, 70, 80 percent or more of sales coming through the online sales counselor programs. Now that we're not appointment only, we have walk-in traffic, we have other things, I would say at least 45 to 55 percent comes through the online sales program. So, you're right, if half of your leads can be touched by that process, why would you eliminate that department? Why wouldn't you work on training it? Why wouldn't you compensate that person well?

And I would say a little different than the car industry, Kevin, is we really want online sales counselors to be that rapport builder, that trust builder. [00:26:00] Take more time. It's not somebody like with roofing companies. Hey, give me your name number. I'll schedule for someone to come out and look at your roof leak.

We want that person to really set a qualified appointment and not just throw anything at the wall to see if it sticks. I have one builder I work with where 89 percent of the sales come through the online sales counselor to the sales agents. So, it can happen. In answer to your question, I have no idea why you would eliminate that department.

Greg Bray: You know, one of the things that I'm thinking about as we talk through this data is the inherent unreliability of email as the primary communication tool. As somebody who's involved in helping get email configured and set up, there are so many times where email systems just decide to do funny things for some reason.

I don't know why, where the email that you thought was going to automatically go out doesn't go. Or the email that you send ends up in somebody's junk mail folder, so they never see it and don't respond. Or there's a little typo in that email [00:27:00] address they put in the form by accident, you know, where they misspelled gmail.com and it bounces. And often because it's an automated system, that bounce message doesn't go back to the person who could actually do something with it, right? Because they made a typo on the form.

Now, granted, there's some who never responded to anything, but the ones that are expecting the auto-generated email to go out and then I'll respond when they come back to me are so dependent on that email working properly. And then, let's not get into the social issue of the fact that, well, I got that email 3 days ago, and then I accidentally deleted it, or 25,000 other emails have come in since then, so it's gone down to the bottom of my box. So, I've forgotten about it and I'm not even seeing it, even though I got it, to do anything with. All these reasons that just waiting to send an email just doesn't cut it if you really want a sale.

Leah Fellows: All of that is so important and that's why it's so important for us to require, so many builders don't want to require a phone number on a form fill. I'll shop [00:28:00] builder websites and there won't even be a space to put your phone number in. It's not even I don't want to require it, I don't even want to ask you for your phone number. And it's some sort of assumption that people who are asking a question or want information aren't going to give you their number.

Now, if you force them to register in order to see something, like, with gated information. Yeah, they don't want to give you their phone number or their email. But if they're actually going to inquire about something, they will give it to you if you ask for it. And then you can create that diversity of the touch point, right? Your email, your phone call, your text message. You've got to be able to reach out through different means.

And sometimes, and I teach OSCs this, you need to step outside your CRM and go through your inbox. Because sometimes your CRM is getting sent to their junk, and if you send it from your own Outlook, or whatever you have, it might actually hit their targeted inbox. So, there are just so many ways, and you need someone who is proactive, not reactive, you know, so they're [00:29:00] proactively engaging with that lead, not waiting for that autoresponder to go out.

Right.

Kevin Weitzel: Well, I can tell you from a form standpoint that what we do with our IFPs, we actually have a form that people can save a plan. And when they save a plan, we recommend to builders because we have tens of thousands of IFPs that we've created for hundreds of builders across over 45 states. Okay. There's five that we have them sold to.

And with those numbers, we can tell you beyond a reasonable doubt that you should make a name and email mandatory and phone number optional. If you make it mandatory, you will see a reduction in leads. If you make it optional, a ridiculously large number of people will give you the number later on down the path once they get that first answer.

Leah Fellows: But have the space

Kevin Weitzel: Have the space there, yes. But don't make it mandatory. Yes. Now on the other factor, Greg, what you were talking about, and I wanted to touch on this because I think that it's something falls really more in your wheelhouse, but with all of the various servers that are out there and Microsoft platforms and all the different email [00:30:00] platforms that people use, being that people are sending their emails from a business address, how often do you see that just the natural filters that people have if they're inquiring from work, that are filter will keep that email from coming through, it'll send automatically junk or spam? And I know a lot of people don't check their junk or spam at all.

Greg Bray: There's definitely a decent percentage of emails that go into junk or spam. Frankly, now there's a lot of spam blockers that are a layer further upstream that don't even let it get to your junk folder where it'll try to block it as well.

So, the point isn't that gosh, we need to fix email from a blocking standpoint because unfortunately, there's too much junk out there to just open the gates. The point is, if you send an email, you cannot assume that somebody got it. You know, you need to give them enough time to respond, but if you don't hear anything, it doesn't mean that they aren't interested. It means they may not have gotten the email or they got it and they're just busy or whatever. This idea of send one and done and then move on. I don't know. I think that's a miss from an OSC program. And I'm sure [00:31:00] Leah, you train your people differently than that, right?

Leah Fellows: Oh, for sure.

Carol Morgan: And email and spam filters is a huge argument for calling them if you have their phone number. And if they've checked that box, that it's okay to text them, then why the heck aren't you texting them? Call them and text them. Be like Leah, send them a video. Just do something. I guess Greg was saying, you know, they didn't go on your site and fill out a contact form because they don't want to buy a house. They're there because they do want to buy a house from someone. So, don't take yourself out of the consideration stage by doing nothing. And it's also just a huge argument for having an autoresponder and having a drip email campaign so that at least they're getting something if nothing else is happening.

Leah Fellows: To be honest, like, when we're doing the mystery shop itself, we're checking our spam folders to make sure that the builder is getting credit if they sent something, and it went to our spam. Now, I think very rarely, and we'd have to bring Ben in on this and ask him, very rarely [00:32:00] are they finding too much in spam.

So, when we're saying somebody never responded, or only sent one email throughout that 30 days, or didn't send an auto-responder or whatever, unless it's getting caught, like Greg said, in some really far upstream thing, they're not coming in. They're not there. I don't think that we can make a case for these particular builders doing it and our shoppers aren't seeing it.

Greg Bray: No, I didn't mean to imply that this data.

Leah Fellows: Oh, no, no, I know you weren't. I know you weren't.

Greg Bray: It's just the idea that, if you're depending on email alone, because you're telling us people are only sending emails and not calling and not doing all of this and they need to do more if they can do more.

Well, this has been fascinating. There's a lot more data out there. Just from each of you, one quick, if a builder who reads this can only do one thing different, what's your recommendation? Carol, what's your one thing that this data tells builders they should change and do better?

Carol Morgan: Well, as a marketing company, I'm going to have to say, set up drip [00:33:00] campaigns. You know, set up a campaign for your company as a whole, and then if you have new communities coming online that you're setting up VIP lists. Set those up individually for different communities as well. We have builders that have broken that down even further and have active adult-only drip campaigns, campaigns just for realtors, campaigns for their current happy homeowners. There's a lot you can do with drip email campaigns. And I think as an industry, we still have lots of opportunity there. They could take a lead from White House Black Market, or any of these people who harass me on a daily basis that I still haven't removed or deleted, or unsubscribe from. I think that email works and we need to work it better.

Greg Bray: Leah, one thing they need to do based on this data?

Leah Fellows: Make sure you have a lead nurturing program, not a lead distribution program. And when I say that, what I mean is there's one person or one department, depending on how big you are, that all the leads go to, there's one way, there's a method to the madness on how we're [00:34:00] going to develop those leads into viable appointments and then send them off. When we are just a distribution center, when those leads come into the marketing person or the overworked person that deals with contract management and everything else, and they just get the lead and then forward it to the salespeople, we're going to have mixed results, as we can see, on how well that person actually ever gets followed up with. So, be a lead nurturing program, not a lead distribution program.

Greg Bray: Can I take the opportunity to actually add one suggestion? I think people listening today, you can mystery shop your own website. Go fill out the form. First of all, make sure it works and doesn't have an error. See if anybody calls you back. Go get a Gmail account that nobody knows you're the boss or whoever and fill out your own form and see what happens. I don't mean you have to go through the whole buying process, but just fill out the form and see if anybody calls you.

Leah Fellows: That's all the beginning stages of auditing and evaluating your program for improvement. You've [00:35:00] got to constantly take a look, audit, evaluate, figure out where the areas are for improvement, and that's really what this report is all about. What are the areas where we could focus on improvement? And for those builders that really want to get ahead of these other builders that are on this report, there's plenty of ways to do it. There's plenty of ways to stand out in the crowd.

Greg Bray: How does somebody get a copy of the full report?

Leah Fellows: Carol probably has it on her website. I have it on my website. You can go to either Denim Marketing. You can go to Melinda Brody and Company or Blue Gypsy Inc. online on our websites and download the report.

Carol Morgan: At Denim it's at denim marketing.com slash online mystery shop slash.

Leah Fellows: Mine, I don't know if that's what it says, but there's button, there's a big button on my website that says download the latest report. And I did have somebody point out, you know, recently downloaded it and say to me, Hey, this is the 2023. Do you have the 2024? So, this is 2023 results. It's I believe the fourth one, so

Greg Bray: This is the 4th [00:36:00] annual one. It's dated 2023, but it's the 4th annual. And this data has been fascinating. Thank you so much. Leah and Carol for sharing with us. Leah, if somebody wants to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to connect with you?

Leah Fellows: LinkedIn is always a good one find me @Leah Fellows on LinkedIn, or you can have a free chat and a virtual cup of coffee with me if you go to my website, bluegypsyinc.com, that's I N C dot com. You can get on my schedule and we can have a chat.

Greg Bray: And Carol, how can somebody connect with you?

Carol Morgan: Well, I'm busy right now going to Leah's site because I never get to talk to her. I'm going to go sign up for one of her chats, but if you want to find me, denimmarketing.com, carol@denimmarketing.com. We're on all the socials @denimmarketing. So, pretty easy to find.

Greg Bray: Well, thank you again for being with us. And thank you everybody for listening today to The Home Builder Digital Marketing Podcast. I'm Greg Bray with Blue Tangerine.

Kevin Weitzel: And I'm Kevin Weitzel with OutHouse. Thank you. [00:37:00]